OK, this post may not be for the faint of heart...put on your propeller beanies, because here we go.

Jim Laurent over at Sun has a really cool post over on his blog about using a VMware Fusion hosted Solaris 10 virtual machine to play around with the open source ZFS file system and  a trio of USB sticks to make a poor-man's Raid-Z array using USB sticks instead of actual hard drives.

So if you ever had a dream of using your Mac to make yourself a redundant array of inexpensive disks using USB sticks, but without having to deal with RAID-5's write hole (ed note: what a great name), well, now you know what you're doing this weekend.

You can see a more advanced version of what Jim did with his VMware Fusion Solaris VM and three USB sticks demo'd by some german colleagues of his in this video, where they use three separate USB hubs, each with four USB sticks in it, to demonstrate  the redundancy of zPools and ZFS in a RAID-Z configuration.

Are your propeller's spinning yet?

The Fusion team does its best to make Fusion, and everything that touches it, as user-friendly, and Mac-like as possible.  That means, in part, user interfaces and software that are self-explanatory, and "just work."

Of course, try as we might, documentation is always good to have.  And written documentation is great for going back to and poring over.  But, then again, video is great for making things really obvious in a hurry.

So, in the pursuit of making even documentation "just work" we're going to be making it a habit to do screen casts of key features and utilities, going forward.  With a rocking backing soundtrack, of course.

Our first effort concerns VMware Importer, VMware's free utility for importing Parallels and Virtual PC virtual machines to run with VMware Fusion.   We have release notes, of course.  But we also made a video to show just how easy importing a Parallels or Virtual PC virtual machine is. 

Just another step towards making Fusion the easiest way to run Windows on Mac.

Enjoy!